My Lazy Summer as a Public Employee
By
Jason L. Riley
June 19, 2018 7:04 p.m. ET
Below are FellaErpts (excerpts) from the article.
One summer during college in the early 1990s, I landed a cushy job reading residential water meters for the local utility. The pay was excellent—thank you, taxpayers—and I enjoyed working outdoors in the warm weather. But what made the job so memorable were the minimal work requirements.
Each morning after we’d punched in and donned our uniforms, a half-dozen of us summer hires—mostly college kids like me who had gotten the job via our parents’ connections—would pile into a utility van. Waiting behind the wheel was a genial old-timer named Hank, who drove us to the assigned neighborhood, where we would walk house-to-house recording the meter readings. Once we finished our routes, Hank told us that first morning, the rest of the day was ours. Typically, it took only about two hours.
The upshot was that we spent most of the summer devising creative ways to kill entire afternoons, and not a few late mornings. We’d read, nap, hit the beach, shoot hoops, catch a movie, play videogames and engage in various other activities that I’m almost certain fell outside the job description for a water-meter reader.
Hank would drop us off and disappear until it was time to return the van to the dispatcher and punch out for the day. My recollection is that no one on my crew ever asked questions or feared getting caught. And the summer workers on other crews, we eventually learned, were up to the same antics.
When I told my father what was going on, he just laughed and recounted the old joke about why government employees don’t look out the window in the morning. (So they’ll have something to do in the afternoon.) For a summer, it felt like I was living the punch line. The real joke, though, is on the local taxpayers, who fund all the featherbedding. And that joke never gets old.
Last week, Baltimore’s inspector general revealed that over a 20-month period, city meter readers earned $120,000 while loafing on the clock.
Yes, $120,000 is chump change in a city the size of Baltimore, which passed a $2.8 billion budget earlier this month. But you’d be a fool to think that meter readers in Baltimore are the only public employees gaming the system.
Investigators learned that Department of Public Works, which employed the meter readers, had an unofficial policy condoning the practice.
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The horse is not dead yet so I gonna beat him a bit more.
Years ago I wrote this bit of Foolishness about Government Sector Job Training...
They Were Not Trying To Be Funny
July 9, 2009
I was listening to the news on the radio a few days ago.
The News Sayer wanted me to worry about the Dire Economic Situation we find ourselves in today.
He was reporting on the jobless rate and what the Stimulus Package Money was going to do about it.
He went on to say that money was going to be put into job creation and one of the quickest ways to have a beneficial effect on the jobless rate was to create Government Sector Jobs.
I guess I understand that but the way he put it was interesting. This is the exact quote…
“Government jobs will have an immediate effect on the unemployment rolls because there is little job training required.”
What? They don’t train Government Sector Employees?
Is that a surprise to you?
The Smartfella is not trying to be a Wise Guy when he says... It Is Not a Surprise to Him.
Would I kid u?
Smartfella
